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Beauty Contested. How much of Keynes’ remains in Behavioural Economics Beauty Contests?

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  • Alessandro Lanteri
  • Anna Carabelli

Abstract

In one of the most famous passages of economic literature, John Maynard Keynes (1936, p.156) likens the stock market to a beauty contest in which the winners are those who anticipate the average opinion. Recently there have been attempts at investigating the BC experimentally (Nagel 1995, Duffy & Nagel 1997, Ho et al. 1998, Bosch-Domenech et al. 2002, Güth et al. 2002). In Experimental Beauty Contests, participants choose a real number from a closed interval, e.g. I [0,100]. Whoever picks the number closest to p times the average (usuallywith p = 2/3) is the winner of a monetary reward. An experiment like this is dominance solvable: the process of iterated elimination of dominated strategies leads to the unique and stable equilibrium at which every player chooses zero, and every player wins. Keynes’ metaphor, on the other hand, referred to a situation in which not all participants can win, so that the goal of individual investors and speculators must be “to outwit the crowd” (p. 152). Despite the differences, the Keynesian theory of decision under uncertainty tallies with the behaviour observed in Experimental Beauty Contests.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandro Lanteri & Anna Carabelli, 2008. "Beauty Contested. How much of Keynes’ remains in Behavioural Economics Beauty Contests?," ICER Working Papers 20-2008, ICER - International Centre for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:icr:wpicer:20-2008
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Lorenzo Esposito & Giuseppe Mastromatteo, "undated". "In the Long Run We Are All Herd: On the Nature and Outcomes of the Beauty Contest," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_972, Levy Economics Institute.
    2. D'Orlando, Fabio & Sanfilippo, Eleonora, 2010. "Behavioral foundations for the Keynesian consumption function," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 1035-1046, December.
    3. George, William, 2023. "Strategic behaviour and manipulation resistance in Peer-to-Peer, crowdsourced information gathering," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 1-23.
    4. Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina, 2012. "Speculation and regulation in commodity markets: The Keynesian approach in theory and practice," MPRA Paper 44131, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Beauty Contest; Behavioural Economics; Keynes; Reasoning.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B31 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals - - - Individuals
    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

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